What The ****? !
All was quiet in the Garden of Eden
and not a fig-leaf stirred...
but after the Fall of Man
(usually forwards and enthusiastically, we note)
literature
required some word for what happens
when evening falls, the curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
lovers begin to nuzzle, friends
remember a prior engagement, journalists
try to bribe the night porter, and
some novelists, blushing, draw the curtain, while others
brighten and begin to enjoy their work; and filmmakers
need to decide between a darkling screen,
a symbolic firework display, or
box-office returns.
Egyptian hieroglyphics afford little clue (there's
a chance missed) : but jump-cutting now to Anglo-Saxon usage,
Chaucer, Father of the English Language so we're told,
used 'swyve', in a masculine sort of way:
'he swyved her bolt upright' leaves little to the imagination.
Then courtly French may have given us 'make love' -
an oxymoron if ever there was one -
being still, however the romantic hope of many, and the dread of
Casanovas the world around, as they have it off (sic) .
Shakespeare, being a poet, immortalised it as
'making the beast with two backs' - graphic, but
it didn't catch on with the tabloids, who prefer
only four-letter words which fit the headlines better.
The Italian Renaissance, noticing in its Mediterranean way
the resemblance of the male danglies to a fig fruit
(backtrack to Eden here for speculations)
may well have given us (the Florentine g being pronounced gutturally)
that English word with added onomatopoeia
though let's not go into that,
which now that blasphemy's out, is all too common,
rendering a much-enjoyed activity all too often as a term of abuse
which I leave to psychologists to work out. I refer to
f**k.
Then as this term, which it doesn't take a lip-reader
to note frequently on the lips (and spare-time pursuits) of footballers,
became a sort of holy word of abuse,
and lawyers lurked around the gossip columns,
words mingling the comic, the non-accusatory
and the slightly admiring, were sought:
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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